There are, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, conditions that establish themselves so unobtrusively that one only recognizes them when they are there – like good manners, like a handwriting, like that kind of calm that does not come from idleness, but from repetition. And there are conditions that are so conspicuous that they carry their own proof with them: they stand in the mirror, they stand in numbers, they stand in the reaction of the surroundings. Hans Castorp found himself, after weeks and months of small, correct violence against himself, in such a conspicuous condition.
He stood, early in the morning, in the white area of a GYMcube, and the white, like all white in our time, was not innocent, but functional: it was not meant to comfort, but to show. The cube smelled of metal, of rubber, of that dry cleanliness that has nothing to do with water and yet is treated like hygiene. It was quiet, apart from the soft hum of a screen that was on standby, and the irregular breathing of a person who had learned to count his breath without experiencing it.
Hans Castorp wore no clothing on his upper body; not because he was vain, but because vanity would be too cheap a word for this new relationship to the body that was cultivated up here. One showed oneself because one wanted to measure oneself; one exposed oneself because one no longer believed that somewhere inside there dwelt a secret that had to be respected. And yet it did dwell there – only differently.
His body had, in the cold of the mirror and the warmth of the blood, become a kind of diagram.
The shoulders stood broad, but not in that clumsy, triumphant way known from pictures of strongmen who want to prove to the world that they are stronger than it is. It was rather a proper breadth, a breadth that had resulted from tension and pressure, from hanging on his own weight, from pressing the bar over his head, from the constant, unspectacular tensing of the torso. The chest was defined – not dramatic, but precise; and below it the abdomen ran out into that clear, hard surface that one could, if one is strict, call unbourgeois, because it does not look like comfort, but like deprivation.
The lines of the abdominal muscles stood out like the joints in a stone floor: not as decoration, but as order. At the sides, on the flanks, those narrow, tough muscles were outlined that hold the torso together when one lifts heavy and does not want to break; and above them, on the arms, the veins ran like small roads – discreet, but unmistakable – as if the body, through training, had pushed its own map outward.
A band lay around his upper arm, dark, tight, with a small metallic edge: a modern spy that no longer sat on the wrist like a ring, but bit in where the muscle works. Hans Castorp had learned that today one no longer simply “sweats” – one “tracks”. And he had learned that tracking creates a strange intimacy: one becomes one’s own observer, and the observer is rarely merciful.
He brought his arm across his chest, pulled it with the other hand into a stretch that Zieser had shown him – not as wellness, but as duty – and while he pulled, he saw his face.
It was not youthful. It was not old either. It was – and this is the uncanny thing about optimization – in a way become neutral that one would once have called “healthy”, but today calls “in shape”, as if health were a question of form. The cheeks were not sunken, but firm; the gaze was clear, but not friendly, rather attentive, as if it constantly had to check whether something was out of line. The hair, short, proper, bore a light streak that gave him something foreign, something that did not look like fashion, but like time.
And there was, in his gaze, the old thing: astonishment.
For Hans Castorp, this man of sensation, had not suddenly become an athlete because he felt himself to be an athlete; he had become one because, as Dr. Porsche had said, he practiced “rituals of personal hygiene” – and rituals work even when one does not understand them. He stood there, in peak form, and did not understand it.
He understood that he had become lighter without being weaker. He understood that he was more awake in the mornings. He understood that his gait – this bourgeois means of locomotion – had acquired a new suspension, because the muscles on the thighs, on the buttocks, on the back were no longer merely tissue, but the result of work. He even understood that the numbers on the ring – the ring! his new marriage – occasionally bestowed on him a mild praise: a lower resting pulse, a calmer night, a better value.
But he did not understand why all this calmed and disquieted him at the same time.
For when one, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, shapes one’s body, one does not only shape muscles; one also shapes expectations. And expectations, once formed, are like a second skin: one cannot take them off without feeling naked.
Hans Castorp released the stretch, shook out his arm. He reached for the logbook that Zieser laid out in every cube like a Bible, and leafed through it. Numbers, repetitions, weights; and between the numbers sometimes a word: “clean”, “trembles”, “went”, “did not go”. The word “did not go” was, in its dry honesty, the most human thing about this book.
He wrote nothing today. Today was not a training day. Today was – and this too was a modern formulation – a walking day.
